Startup reinvents meat and bets you can't taste the difference

May 10, 2014

Updated May 11, 2014 9:33 a.m.

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Ethan Brown, right, founder and chief executive of Beyond Meet, prepares tacos with his employees at a trade show in Anaheim. Brown's company is meeting a growing demand for meat alternatives, attracting investors such as Bill Gates. ANN JOHANSSON , PHOTOS: ANN JOHANSSON, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Packages of Chicken-Free Strips and Beef-Free Crumble at the Beyond Meat booth at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, Calif., March 8, 2014. Beyond Meat is meeting a growing demand for meat alternatives, attracting unlikely investors such as Bill Gates as increased vegetarianism, health concerns and personal ethics sway consumer habits. ANN JOHANSSON , THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ethan Brown, right, founder and chief executive of Beyond Meet, prepares tacos with his employees at a trade show in Anaheim. Brown's company is meeting a growing demand for meat alternatives, attracting investors such as Bill Gates. ANN JOHANSSON , PHOTOS: ANN JOHANSSON, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Most days after middle school, Ethan Brown walked down Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., and ate a Double-R burger from Roy Rogers.

The Double-R is an East Coast legend, a quarter-pound beef patty topped with melted cheddar and pillowy slices of deli ham, all sandwiched in a Kaiser roll.

As Brown stood in line, he pictured the burger he was about to order. “OK, well there’s the cow, and there’s the milk that comes from the cow,” he thought to himself.

The 13-year-old started to mentally dissect his meal, seeing beyond the processed slices to the real animals embodied in each slab of meat, and it weighed on his conscience.

Later, he smelled the leather of his shoes after basketball practice and had another realization. “Why am I wearing their skin?” he wondered.

These epiphanies led Brown to make a decision that would set the course of his life. He gave up meat and became a dedicated vegan by age 17.

Twenty-five years later, Brown, now 42, is at the forefront of a food revolution.

In an unassuming brick warehouse on Main Street in El Segundo, Brown and Brent Taylor, a 33-year-old Manhattan Beach native, are at the helm of a burgeoning startup. They are backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams in the creation of something that Gates has said gives him optimism for the future of food.

Brown and Taylor have created a new kind of chicken: Beyond Meat. It’s a plant-based chicken strip made of soy and peas that is regarded in the fledgling mock meat industry as having achieved something no other such product has managed to do. Beyond Meat not only tastes, but tears and feels like chicken.

“For people who are actually repulsed by meat, they’re not going to like this,” Stone told Fast Company magazine. “It feels fatty and muscly and like it’s not good for you when you’re chewing it. For a long-time vegan, it’s a little bit freaky.”

A new faux chicken is no small thing for the larger prospects of the world’s health.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last month sounded a call-to-arms in a report that outlined the devastating effects climate change already is having on food resources, coastal communities and economic growth. Livestock production is one of the main contributors to the greenhouse gases that are altering the world’s climate. And meat production, as Gates has noted, is both environmentally unsustainable and unlikely to keep pace with population growth.

“Meat consumption worldwide has doubled in the last 20 years, and it is expected to double again by 2050,” Gates wrote in a blog titled “The Future of Food.” “Raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact. There’s no way to produce enough meat for 9billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. We need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.”

The answer, Brown argues, is to move beyond meat. Gates and Beyond Meat’s other investors agree.

“There’s a certain fatalism that people have around climate change and what’s going to happen, that there’s nothing we can do about it,” Brown said. “But if you believe that number, then there’s a really easy solution: It’s 3 to 4 ounces at the center of your plate. It’s one of the easiest things you can do for climate change.”

THE QUEST

A few years ago, Brown read a Worldwatch Institute research paper that identified livestock as the biggest contributing factor to climate change. Shaken by this claim, he realized his work in the clean-energy sector wasn’t the most urgent way to address what he believes is the most critical issue facing the planet. So he left his job with a large fuel-cell company in search of the perfect meat substitute.

Brown came across a research paper by Fu-Hung Hsieh, a food science professor at the University of Missouri. After 10 years of trial and error, Hsieh and his team had perfected the fibrous texture of their vegan chicken.

With Hsieh bringing the science and Brown, the entrepreneurship, a game-changing chicken substitute was hatched. Brown partnered with Taylor, an agribusiness expert, in 2011, and the duo founded Beyond Meat.

“Think about what meat is,” said Brown, who serves as president and CEO. “Meat is amino acids, water, a little bit of minerals, a little carbohydrates and fat. We can assemble all those things the same way with plant protein as they’re assembled in animal form.”

Non-genetically modified soy and yellow pea protein powders, amaranth, carrot and soy fiber, and spices are mixed with water and run through an extruder that applies heating, cooling and pressure to the proteins at different points. The concoction is then pushed through a specially cut die, extruding the mixture in five rows, and the resulting fleshy ribbons are torn off and collected by hand.

Like their investors, Brown and Taylor are mission-oriented. “There has to be a better way to feed the planet and people’s needs for protein,” Taylor said.

Taylor, a Mira Costa High School and UCLA alumnus, met Brown in late 2010 when he was working as a consultant for venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“I had done a lot of work internationally in markets in India, Turkey, Costa Rica, and I witnessed a huge change that was emerging within meat consumption,” Taylor said. “That’s why I was so excited about it – its essential applicability in marketplaces where people are consuming meat at a rapid pace.”

THE MISSION

Beyond Meat is an easy sell to vegans and vegetarians, but Brown and Taylor want to make their product relevant to meat eaters. Brown’s wife eats meat, and Taylor is a “meat reducer” – he still eats meat occasionally, but does so conscientiously.

“We really do think of ourselves as a meat company, but we’re using all plant-based inputs,” said Taylor, who speaks with bounce and wears an almost constant smile.

Beyond Meat already is available nationwide in Sprouts and Whole Foods markets. Vons and Safeway will stock Beyond Meat this month, the company said, with Target following in September.

The company declined to reveal its financials, other than to note its well-known investors “are not interested in making small bets” and to say that Beyond Meat products will be in 4,000 retail locations by the end of the year.

Beyond Meat employs 15 people at its El Segundo office and 40 more in its Columbia, Mo., factory.

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